The tale of 66 (65?) currencies
An SEO dilemma
Last year, I was writing some articles on the US dollar, and ended up falling into a deep rabbit hole.
If you don’t know what dollar dominance is, you can read about it in my article here:
https://www.currencytransfer.com/blog/expert-analysis/what-is-dollar-dominance
When I was researching for the article, I simply wanted to know how many currencies are pegged to the US dollar.
I typed into Google ‘how many currencies are pegged to the US dollar’.
If you try it now, this is what Google says in a snippet:
Sweet.
I put this fact into the article.
(FYI if you don’t know anything about currencies, 66 is quite a lot — it’s worth mentioning as a stat. That means whatever the US dollar exchange rate is, their own currency follows it. It’s protective, but also potentially exploitative).
Once it was in the article, I decided to find which 66 currencies these were so I could list them in the article.
Terrible mistake.
I ended up pulling a thread and unravelling the entirety of Google and my own sanity.
It sent me down a rabbit hole of financial articles, questioning what was true.
Questioning whether anything was true.
How many currencies are pegged to the US dollar?
As we have seen, Google says it’s 66.
But which currencies?
I checked Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circulating_fixed_exchange_rate_currencies
According to Wikipedia, only 23 are actually directly pegged.
So are people counting currency baskets as part of it? (This means they’re pegged to others as well).
I asked ChatGPT:
“Several”.
At the end, it’s basically shrugged and said “ask Wikipedia”.
The link was broken too. Cheers AI.
Back to digging
Flashback to when I was searching, I needed to find a source for this information.
I wanted the article to stand out and list all the currencies.
These articles had asserted so strongly that it was 66.
My logic was that currency baskets are being included in this. So any country that uses a currency basket to fix its exchange rate is counting as being pegged to the US dollar.
But where did 66 come from?
Who originally came up with this number?
Who originally counted 66?
Someone, somewhere wrote this, and published it.
Top sources
Here are what the top-ranking sources say:
Ava Trade
Ava Trade says “over 66 currencies”:
https://www.avatrade.co.uk/education/market-terms/what-is-currency-peg
So does that mean there are more?
The Balance
The Balance says “at least 66 currencies”:
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-peg-to-the-dollar-3305925
The hyperlink references Ava Trade as well, so you know where they found the number. But they said “at least” to be safe.
Investopedia
Investopedia says “more than 65”:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/040915/countries-use-us-dollar.asp#:~:text=More%20than%2065%20countries%20peg,their%20official%20currency%20of%20exchange.
Some might call this 66.
LinkedIn
A LinkedIn article by Andrew J. Bilden assertively says “65”:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/11-us-dollar-worlds-reserve-currency-andrew-j-bilden/#:~:text=Today%2C%2065%20countries%20are%20pegged%20(fixed%20exchange%20rate)%20to%20the%20US%20Dollar%20and%2011%20countries%20use%20it%20as%20their%20official%20currency.
65 or 66?
To this day I’ve never managed to find out.
To avoid spiraling into madness, I’ve settled on the answer being up to/more than/at least 65/66.
But if you’re the person who originally said 66, please, reveal yourself to the world.
I need answers.
The big problem
In this quest to find a source, I realised a huge problem with Google, and how it discerns things to be true.
Naturally, I want to do the best job possible for my clients.
This involves financial accuracy, and delivering high-traffic articles.
Here’s the problem: if I count the number to be actually, for example, 62 currencies, and I put this in the article, Google may mark this as incorrect.
As every single other article says 66, or 65, then if I put something different, then it will stand out, and most likely be considered wrong, unless I can prove it extensively, which I can’t.
The snippet says 66 as we speak. Google has determined this to be correct.
If I want to maintain a good article, I have to contribute to the mystery stat, unless I can prove it’s not actually correct.
But if I don’t include a stat, then I have no chance of being included in the snippet for ‘how many currencies are pegged to the US dollar?’
At the time, the highest ranking article was a LinkedIn article, stating that it was actually 65 currencies.
When I was writing the article, this was what Google considered to be correct above all others:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/11-us-dollar-worlds-reserve-currency-andrew-j-bilden/
I went with 65, and reinforced the mystery number.
I became another link in the chain:
This got some good rankings for a while (as 65 was more ‘accurate’), until more people started saying 66 again, specifically ‘over 66’.
But still, nobody knows for sure, and they cover themselves by using ambiguous language like ‘over’ and ‘at least’.
What is true on Google
Over 66 is probably is true, or close enough to it. I’m on team 65.
But the point is that it doesn’t really matter.
Multiple sources on the internet now confirm a number without verification, because of a stacking of sources on top of each other all verifying each other to obtain SEO traffic.
As the saying goes, “a lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
It seems like now technology is giving wind to this.
AI will hopefully improve this, but it also suffers from the same problem, often more wild in its hallucinations.
The moral of this story is don’t believe everything you read on the internet (not like you needed to be told that anyway).
It might just be there because some SEO writer read it somewhere else and passed it on.